“When one of my teachers gave out an assignment,
‘write anything you want, one page,’ everybody came
back with just that. I turned in seven pages,” says Michel
Bruneau.

A professor in the Department of Civil, Structural and
Environmental Engineering in the School of Engineering and Applied
Sciences, Bruneau says he has always been writing.

“I have been writing fiction as far back as I can remember
— silly stuff in grade school, Edgar Allen Poe-inspired
horror fantasies and a bunch of other things in high school, and
even a 100-page novella when I was about 18.”

In 1997, Bruneau’s first book was published:
“Inhumanity – Eleven Short Stories that Insult
Intelligence.”

“I was still living in Canada, working at the University
of Ottawa, so the book was written in French,” he says.
“In those short stories, unusual characters chase solutions
to situations confronting — and confounding — them,
down to unusual falls.

“I got positive Radio Canada interviews out of it, so I
felt encouraged a bit. The worst thing you can do to writers is
encourage them, right?”

At the time, Bruneau already had begun work on his first novel
written in English.

An expert on seismic evaluation and retrofit of steel bridges,
buildings and masonry infrastructure, Bruneau came to UB in 1998 as
deputy director of the university’s Multidisciplinary Center
for Earthquake Engineering Research (MCEER).

“The thing that got me started on the novel, “Shaken
Allegiances,” was that everybody kept asking me questions on
two topics,” Bruneau says. “The first one was
earthquakes. You know: ‘You are an earthquake engineer? Can
we have earthquakes here? How big? What happens when they strike?
How safe are we?’

“Earthquakes seem to fascinate people,” he says.
“Even at parties, when some people discover you are an
earthquake engineer, they are curious; they want to know more about
earthquakes. Especially if they have experienced one.”

Another subject that kept coming up when Bruneau traveled
outside of Canada — before he joined the UB faculty —
was the Quebec secessionist movement.

“At conferences, when people learned that I was from
Quebec City, they wanted to know about why Quebec wanted to secede
from Canada — particularly a few years ago when the topic
captured the news, even outside of Canada.

“So I got the crazy idea at the time of mixing both
subjects in a novel.”

“Shaken Allegiances” takes place 48 hours after a
devastating earthquake in Montreal and two weeks before a
referendum on Quebec’s secession from Canada.

“The earthquake itself serves as a metaphor for the bigger
disaster of human nature. Everybody is pulling the situation
— the chaos, the rescue, the ideology — to their own
political advantage,” Bruneau says.

“I remember during an interview on the book with Radio
Canada that the host remarked: ‘Everybody in your book is a
disreputable character.’

“I replied, ‘Well, that is true to a certain extent.
You can’t write a story where everyone is bad, but there are
a fair number of dubious characters in there.’ I wanted to
present a cynical view of human folly, while also being
entertaining.”

“Shaken Allegiances” won the Next Generation Indie
Book Award for Fiction in 2010 and received the George Winter Award
from the American Society of Civil Engineers in 2011.

The book took Bruneau 10 years to complete.

“During the period of time when I was working on it, I was
deputy director, then director, of the earthquake center at UB. It
was a pretty intense workload,” he recalls.

“You try to find time here, find time there. There is a
pull to get back to it, to work on it, but unless you are a
full-time writer, you take what you can.”

Which often means, he says, working in bits and pieces.

Still, this led to his second novel, “The Emancipating
Death of a Boring Engineer,” published in 2012.

Bruneau recounts the story: “An engineer who dedicated his
life to his career finds himself with only six months to live.
Looking back, he realizes that perhaps he should have done things
differently.

“So he decides to reconcile with his ex-wife, whom he
hasn’t seen in 10 years. He does this through a series of
letters. The first one is read to her during his funeral
arrangements — his last wishes — which start with a
request that his casket be filled with 2005 Saint-Émilion,
which is an exceptional and expensive French red wine.

“Now on an unconventional journey — a treasure hunt
of sorts — she is guided by a guy she thought she knew, but
doesn’t recognize. She re-discovers her husband, albeit
posthumously.”

Bruneau explains that each author finds his or her own
inspirations. “For me, I love to write stories that I would
like to read.

“You can’t control inspiration. You really
can’t control where it comes from. And that sometimes leads
to what people call ‘the blank-page syndrome,’ he
says.

“I have never had that happen, but I know that if you try
too hard to control inspiration, you may end up there. You want to
write something on ‘X’ and ‘X’
doesn’t come.”

Bruneau says he had begun writing his third novel, but the
process was interrupted by other ideas.

“I was 100 pages through writing a new novel, but
everything that was coming to my mind was about a completely
different story,” Bruneau says. “So I shelved the one I
was working on and just went in that other direction. Maybe I will
go back to that unfinished novel someday, but when your creative
muse speaks, you listen.”

This gave birth to “My Author is Dead,” his third
novel, published last September.

“It can be described as a satire. Or dystopian fiction. It
can be read purely as entertainment, but it is also deeper than
that,” he says.

“You can say that it’s a book that can’t be
pigeonholed.”

Bruneau says he has received good feedback and reviews from
colleagues around the country and the world — “and even
from people I’ve never met before. It’s unpredictable,
it’s random, but it is most enjoyable because if you are
writing novels, you want people to read them. So getting feedback
is fantastic.

“But, fundamentally,” he says, “you write for
yourself first — before anybody else. If people like it,
great! Mind you, it is logical that people who share your tastes
would enjoy reading your stories.”

Writing a novel is like travelling without a road map, Bruneau
notes. You need a sense of where you want to go, but you may change
directions or you may even change plans.

“But that is the whole point,” he says. “The
underlying message and the mood are set at the beginning, but then
it carries you through discoveries and surprises along the
way.

“By the time you are finished — whenever that may be
— the novel must be able to stand on its own. It has to have
a good plot, a solid story arc, coherence, legs and, perhaps most
importantly, you have to be pleased with the outcome.”